Postgres Going in Multiple Directions

December 18, 2015

In 2013 I blogged about Postgres advancing in multiple directions at once. Having presented my Postgres 9.5 features talk six times already (with another one coming on Tuesday), I have noticed a broader pattern.

Looking at my top-ten items from that presentation, you can see Postgres advancing in multiple use-case directions in the 9.5 release:

Big data: brin (#2), sharding infrastructure (#9)

Data analytics: grouping sets, cube, rollup (#3)

Large servers: memory and locking (#5, #6)

NoSQL: jsonb (#8)

This shows increased multi-directional activity compared to 2013.

Most company-controlled software can advance in one direction, perhaps two, simultaneously. With the community-based development of Postgres, the software can advance effortlessly in multiple directions at the same time. Well, maybe not effortlessly, but pretty close.

Bruce Momjian is a co-founder of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, and has worked on PostgreSQL since 1996 as a committer and community leader. He is a frequent speaker and Postgres evangelist and travels worldwide appearing at conferences to help educate the community on the business...